The Gift Givers
by Gerald Tarrant
Summary: Souma Shigure is a child of the curse. He has known all his life that family is merely a word, but there are some gifts which even a curse cannot destroy.


**NOTES:** I'm sure the events in this fic depart from the canon Furuba storyline in most or even all of its ways. It's not an AU fic, but I don't know much about the manga, and even in the anime, character backstories and the like aren't much touched upon. So take this as an AU fic if you like. I think, though, that making up this backstory about Shigure in my head wasn't as much about plot as it was about the underlying themes in Furuba about family, trust, and faith. Please enjoy.

_Fruits Basket and all characters copyright to Takaya Natsuki, Hakusensha, and TV Tokyo.  
Please do not repost this fanfiction without permission.  
_

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**The Gift-Givers**

When I was fifteen years old, I moved in with Hatori.

It wasn't so much by invitation as that one day I simply showed up on his doorstep with my one suitcase in my hands, my old school backpack strapped to my shoulders, and pounded on the heavy wooden door until he flung it open. Thinking back on it now, I imagine that I must have looked more laughable than anything else, but Hatori did not laugh.

Hatori lived alone. He had always lived alone, as far as I could tell. Where his parents were, no one seemed to know. If we had been a different sort of family, perhaps a normal Japanese family, I think I would have planted hints mercilessly until someone let the story fall. But that wasn't the sort of thing that was done. The only time I had ventured to bring up the topic with my mother, her eyes had gone distant, and she had told me to never speak of it again. "Akito won't allow it," she said, and those words told me more than any explanation could have.

Whatever the case, Hatori had lived in the small house at the edge of the compound ever since I could remember. My mother would send me over now and then to check on him, perhaps with some pastries or a box of freshly made onigiri, or maybe one of her special fruits baskets. What a poor child, she would say with a shake of her head.

I never told my mother that each time I appeared at Hatori's house with the proffered gift, he would take it politely, with that grave smile of his, and slide it into a refrigerator that was already stacked with gift baskets and wrapped vegetables and premade meals of all kinds. He never seemed embarrassed about it, though it would haunt me on those nights that I could not fall asleep, tossing and turning in bed and staring up at the ceiling. The look on his face as he took the boxes from my hands was always so serene. How would it feel, I wondered, to be known as the charity case of the Souma clan?

My mother wasn't the one who finally drove me away. It was my father, the distant, angry parent who, it seemed, had taken it upon himself to ensure I would never amount to anything in the world. Akito, when I was old enough to understand, had taken me aside and had spoken to me in whispers about the horrors that would befall me if I were to disobey the law of the Souma clan. And yet Akito's dark mysteries seemed infinitely less frightening of a spectre than my father's voice, or my father's face, or my father's eyes.

It was not until I entered high school that I began to understand that children born of the curse were also the children of two parents who had expected to bring up a child the way they had been brought up, and that fact in itself was one of the things that made the curse so terrible. It was usually the mothers, I knew, but my own mother had never looked at me with a shadow in her eyes, had never bemoaned the fact she could not take me into her arms. Perhaps it was my own stereotypical misconceptions that did me in, my carefree outlook on life that had always led me to believe that I was the one who had escaped the terrible broken family. I could not bear it if my mother had lost her memory of me.

I don't remember when I began to realize that it was my father who hated me, who hated the curse with such passion that he could not bear to be around me. I already knew he was never home, but I attributed that to the many overseas trips he took for the company he worked for. He was an important man, my mother told me, and I should be proud of him. It was hard to be proud of a man who screamed at me over the dinner table at every meal, who would throw things at my back when I exited the room, who would tell me coldly that I was worth nothing at all. But I tried. I tried for my mother, who put up with our quarrels with such love and patience and a look of calm peace in her eyes even though I knew she was suffering.

In the end, it was not enough. My mother had known, I think, that night my father came home from another of his business trips, already drunk when he walked in the door. I did not wait for him to even speak a word. The spiteful rage in his face when he saw me was enough, and as he opened his mouth, I told him I was leaving.

He cursed at me. He raged and wailed and threatened to break my limbs, and I stood proudly at the doorframe, my toes curling against the tatami, and told him to do his worst. "Akito won't allow it," he sneered finally.

"I don't care."

There was a silence before he finally moved, flinging the teacup he held in his hands to the polished surface of our dinner table, and he said, "You're no son of mine."

I did not stoop to answer that accusation, though I had wished with all my heart to tell him that it was true. But I couldn't do that to my mother, who stood blank-faced and sad-eyed at the kitchen window, her back to us, knowing without seeing.

I left without saying goodbye.

I knew Hatori from school more than I knew him as a Souma. I knew he carried the same curse, but we never spoke of it, and besides there was Ayame, who joined our group with such passionate energy that Hatori and I never had any silence to fill. We were not friends in the traditional sense of the word, but there was something in that bond that caused me to turn my footsteps toward the Souma compound and his door after I'd stepped out of my parents' house into the cold winter night air, suitcase in hand.

He sat me down in the tiny kitchen and put a hot cup of tea into my hands, dragging my suitcase behind him and setting it just outside one of the bedroom doors. "You can have the second bedroom," he said. "There's not a bed, I'm afraid, so you'll have to make do with the futon and some blankets. Are you still cold?"

"Oh, I'm fine," I told him dismissively, and only the trembling of my hands around the sides of the teacup gave any indication I was lying, but really I didn't care. Hatori wasn't the kind to pry, and he said nothing as I finished off my tea in two gulps and was smiling disarmingly at him. He said nothing the next morning either, nor the next day, and as the weeks drifted into months, I continued to sleep in the second bedroom, study at the dinner table in his kitchen, and clean the house while he went to work after school. He'd found a part-time job as a delivery boy, and it was with part envy, part fiendish glee that I wheedled some spending money out of him every time he came home with a paycheck.

I don't think I would have done so if he'd felt sorry for me or if he had made me feel indebted to him in any way. But it was simply Hatori, who did everything with such an easy careless grace. There was an air of wonder surrounding him, something I could almost feel at the back of my neck whenever he was in the house, like a delicious cool breeze or ray of white sunshine.

Two weeks after I arrived, we received our first gift-bearing visitor. I didn't recognize the woman standing at the door when I opened it, holding a box of sushi in her hands and blinking at me. "Is Souma Hatori at home?" she said, trying to peer in past me. I was about to call out that there was a suspicious individual standing at our front door, when Hatori appeared from the kitchen.

"It's all right," he told me and accepted the food offering with his usual calm, bowing to her and giving her such a brilliant smile that even I felt the beginning twinges of jealousy. I muttered something about lady friends after he had shut the door, and he had laughed. "That's Souma Makiko," he said. "I guess she would be your distant aunt. She likes to bring me sushi on Wednesdays."

Makiko's sushi was high quality stuff that I would have been lucky to have once a year when I lived with my parents, and that night, I had lain there wondering if my mother would be coming by with another fruits basket or dessert. She always packed them herself with juicy fresh grapes and bright orange mikan and bananas just the right shade of yellow. Then I realized it was the first time I had really thought of her since I'd left home, and I cried myself to sleep.

We received various other gift-givers over the next few weeks, and as the time went on, they began to recognize me, to address me as I opened the door instead of staring over my shoulder for Hatori. I learned their names. Most of them were Souma, as I had suspected. How many of them knew about the curse, I did not know, but there were some of them who would look at me with the knowledge in their eyes that they _saw_. I let them see. That was the whole reason I had left home, after all, to have the freedom to be what I had been born to be.

I grew particularly fond of Makiko, who learned my story in bits and pieces as the months went by. She took to bringing an extra box of sushi just for me. At first I had protested, saying that I hadn't done anything special to deserve such treatment, but I stilled as she pressed the box into my hands. There was something in her face that I didn't dare question, the knowledge of something terrible, like the sound of Akito's voice, or the look in my father's eyes. "Take it," she said. "It's the least I can do."

My mother did not come.

One night there was a terrible rainstorm, and Hatori had phoned from work, saying he would be late because he didn't want to walk home in this weather, and there was no one to drive him. It was a Wednesday night, and the rain was coming down so hard that as the knock sounded on the door, I thought it was Hatori, because Makiko would not be so insane as to make her usual visit that night.

When I opened the door, she stood there with the same gentle smile on her face and the two boxes of sushi in her hands, wrapped in layers of plastic bags.

"It's pouring!" I protested, and she simply laughed, handing the food over.

"I couldn't bear the thought of you and Hatori sitting at home tonight eating TV dinners, Shigure," she said. It would have done little to protest that whatever else was true, Hatori did not buy TV dinners, so I simply took the packages from her arms and said, "Thank you."

"Is he here?" she wondered, and there was the peering again, into the hallways of the house as if he would magically materialize out of a doorway. I told her no, that he was still at work, and she looked so worried I hurried to tell her he would be home soon, that it was just the rain slowing him down.

"Please tell him I stopped by and asked after him," she said, the frown on her face deepening.

"Oh, I shall," I said, and was startled to find that one of her hands had closed gently on my wrist, a light touch, but the urgency was there.

"Please," she said again. I looked down into her face and noticed the tears in her eyes, sensed for the first time that there was something she had wanted to tell me all these months and could not. Even as her hand dropped from my wrist without a sound and she bowed silently, hurrying back down the garden walk, I realized I knew.

When Hatori came home finally, drenched and looking tired and pale, I handed him one of the bento boxes and said simply, "Your mother stopped by tonight."

We did not speak of it again, and Makiko's visits continued as smoothly as before, yet something seemed to have changed subtly in the air between Hatori and me. It was as simple as passing him in the hallway in the morning before school on the way to the bathroom to brush my teeth, or catching his eye as he leaned casually on the kitchen counter with his usual lounging grace, speaking to someone on the telephone. I wasn't sure what it was, just that the feeling of delicious breeze or ray of sunshine had deepened, become almost tangible as a touch or an embrace is tangible. I teased him mercilessly as usual, and he would reply back in his slow banter, but sometimes as we laughed together I would catch his eye and knew that he felt it also.

It was a morning about a year after I had moved in with Hatori, and I had gotten up early and was moving stealthily around the house to make breakfast. Hatori had gone to bed late, and being a light sleeper, I knew when the knock on the door sounded, it would wake him up. I hurried as fast as my feet could carry me down the wooden floor and into the entrance hall, unlocking the door and throwing it open so the noise wouldn't disturb him. It was the postman, I thought surely.

The woman who stood there smiled up at me uncertainly, and I saw she held in her hands a beautifully wrapped fruits basket.

"Hello, mother," I said as my brain seemed to go blank for a moment.

"I wanted to bring you some sushi," she said, holding out the basket. "But I remembered how much you liked oranges..."

I accepted the basket from her as if trapped in some slow, waking dream. The sound of her voice whispered through my ears, and when I finally had recovered myself enough to focus on what she was saying, she had stopped and was gazing at me with a small, worried smile.

"Are you doing all right?"

I thought of her all alone in the house with my father's temper, how much she had sacrificed so that I would grow up knowing that there was such a thing as love in the world, and then I looked down at the fruits basket in my arms and saw that the name on the card was not Hatori's but my own.

"Yes," I said, as a tear rolled down my cheek. "I'm doing all right, mother."

Her smile eased, and the corners of her mouth turned up just like she used to smile at me when I had done something she was particularly proud of. "I'm glad," she said simply, and reached out to squeeze my hand gently. "Please tell Hatori that I hope he is well."

It wasn't until after she had gone, until after I'd pushed the door closed in a daze and turned around with the basket in my hands that I realized Hatori was standing there quietly behind me. He watched me with a gentle expression on his face, and I remembered the look in Makiko's eyes that night. "Good morning," I told him, moving past him into the kitchen and placing the basket on the table. "Would you like some breakfast?"

Looking back through the years, I realize that the various gift-givers stopped coming after Hatori and I graduated from high school. Many of them came by to offer their various congratulations, and then we never saw them again, as if that one ceremony had thrown up a barrier between the Hatori they had known and the Hatori that existed now. Perhaps it was the mysterious stigma of adulthood, as if all adults were fastidious, self-sufficient, as if the mere mention of the word was a protective charm. I thought of my father and his hatred of the sight of me, and wondered how that could be true.

Makiko was the only one who kept coming. Faithfully every Wednesday evening, she would stop by with our two boxes of sushi, refusing to step into the house, to stay even though I invited her in. Hatori heard me once, and when she had gone, told me to stop.

"But why?" I protested. "She deserves to at least spend time with you! She's your mother!"

"It doesn't matter what I want," he said. "It's not what she wants, and that's the way it will be."

It was times like that that I could not understand the riddles of the Souma clan, how family member could turn against family member and even the most well-intentioned gesture would somehow become a weapon. Hatori and I were the exception, I found, two Soumas tied more closely than blood, striking out blindly against the curse that bound us. It wasn't right, I decided, that child should be turned against parent, cousin against cousin.

"I don't know how," I told Hatori, "and I don't know when. But I'm going to do everything I can to make things right."

He had looked at me and said the words that I knew bound even him. "Akito won't allow it."

"It's not about Akito," I said. "It's about family."

My mother never came by again, and sometimes in the middle of the night I would wake, thinking I heard knocking at the door. I rushed out of bed a few times to fling it wide open, hoping to see her standing there with the moon in her hair and the fruits basket in her hands. I wanted her to take me in her arms and tell me how much she loved me, because I realized as the years went on that even though she had showed it as much as she was able, she had never said the words.

I wanted to hear the words, and yet I knew she couldn't speak them, just as I could not break free of my curse. It was something that I don't think even Hatori understood, though he wanted to. The gift-givers to him had been necessary annoyances, sometimes people who broke up the monotony of the day, but nothing more. But to me, by opening that door and hearing them say my name with smiles in their voices, by taking the gift with a bow and a kind word, I had given a part of myself even as I took a part of them. That was a part of life that Akito and my father had never known, something my mother had given me that they could not take away.

It was not coincidence, I'm sure, that Hatori paid me a visit one day specifically to tell me something Ayame had told him, something about his little brother and Akito and the curse that loomed over all of our heads, and the idea came to me. Akito wouldn't allow it, I knew, but that was no barrier to me. I think my mind was already made up before Hatori had even begun, thinking of all those gift-givers and then Makiko and my mother with her neatly wrapped fruits basket, of all those pieces of people's hearts which they had freely given me in the guise of tangible things.

So it was that when he was fifteen years old, Souma Yuki moved in with me.


End file.
